Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 8035 The relationship between demonic activity and physical illness is a question the New Testament addresses with more directness than is sometimes acknowledged, while also providing important guardrails against the kind of sweeping attribution that causes serious pastoral harm. The answer is not a simple yes or no, and the difference matters enormously in…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 8036 Few questions at the intersection of theology and pastoral care carry higher stakes than this one. The way a minister or counsellor approaches the relationship between demonic activity and mental illness will shape the care they offer, and it could either help or significantly harm the people they are trying to serve. Both…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04114 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, announces dramatic healings, and encourages large financial donations as an act of faith. Millions of people watch these programmes. Some are ill and desperately hopeful….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04116 The question of whether the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament remain available to the church today is among the most practically consequential theological debates of the modern era. For much of evangelical Christianity in the West, the answer has been shaped not primarily by careful biblical exegesis but…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04113 The question of whether God still performs miracles is one that evangelical Christians answer very differently, and the disagreement tends to generate more heat than light. One position dismisses virtually all claimed miraculous experience as enthusiastic error or deliberate fabrication. Another uses the language of miracles so freely that the word loses the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04051 Few topics in contemporary Christianity generate more heat and less light than healing. On one side, dramatic claims fill conference stages and television screens; on the other, sceptical evangelicals dismiss the whole category as a relic of the apostolic age. Scripture, characteristically, is more measured than either extreme, and what it actually says…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121 The sight of someone placing their hands on a sick person and praying for healing can provoke a range of reactions in evangelical circles, from warm affirmation to deep suspicion. For some, the practice conjures images of televangelist excess and manufactured spectacle. For others, it represents a sincere and scripturally grounded act of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06076 The question of what Paul’s thorn actually was has occupied readers for centuries, partly because Paul is deliberately vague and partly because the passage sits within one of the most extraordinary sections of personal disclosure in the entire New Testament. In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Paul describes having been caught up into the third…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4068 The gift of healings is listed plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:9 and 28, and the New Testament account of its exercise in the early church is vivid and specific. Lame men walk. The blind see. Peter’s shadow falls across the sick, and they recover. Paul lays hands on the father of Publius on…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11040 The idea that Christians can “activate” healing by speaking God’s Word has become popular particularly through Word of Faith teaching. Believers are encouraged to “speak healing into existence” or “claim your healing” by quoting Scripture. But does the Bible actually teach that our words have power to activate God’s healing? Let’s examine what…